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The Simply Cups website track how many cups are collected. As I write this, they've done more than 930,000 cups. From only 250 sites, that's quite amazing.

Of course the best thing to do is to use a reusable cup (see which cafes give you a discount for that). But the next best thing is to recycle the paper cups - especially at the office where there are so many.

Thursday, May 10, 2018

This Saturday Aldi (in Australia) are having an amazing sale on LED lights - which are super efficient. How efficient? Their conversion chart shows just how much less power these bulbs use to give the same light. Huge savings.

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

How much energy does a light bulb use? Is it worth replacing? Those kind of answers can be found with this easy guide.

Find the light bulb wattage on the left hand side. Across the top find the hours per day it is used. Where that row and column meet is the cost of powering that light bulb for one year.

An old 75 Watt bulb running 5 hours a night costs $37 a year. Definitely worth changing to a more efficient option.

It also works for other items - if you know their power usage. A stereo that uses 10 Watts in standby mode all day will cost $24 a year even without playing any music (might be worth turning off at the wall). A laptop computer that uses 20 Watts and is used for 4 hours per day will cost just $8 to run.

For this calculator I've assumed 27 cents per unit of electricity. If your price is different then the estimates may vary.

Also, if the exact wattage isn't in the table, use one that is close to it as an estimate. Or if you've got a calculator you can do the exact calculations yourself. Here's the formula:

There's a bit of variation from year to year. Often are El Nino years are a bit hotter and La Nina years not so much. This next graph colours the El Nino and La Nina years differently. We can see that even La Nina years (blue) are getting hotter, as are the El Nino years and neutral years. Which ever way we look at it we are entering uncharted territory.

Tuesday, October 03, 2017

This is the TeamArrow solar racecar. TeamArrow are based here in Brisbane and compete in the World Solar Challenge (2017 Challenge starts 8 October). They finished 8th in 2015 and I got to climb inside their racecar.

The car is 220 kg, cruises at around 85 kph and has a top speed of 126 kph. Surprisingly, it does all this on the same amount of power as your average toaster. Phenomenal.

Part of the reason is aerodynamics. After all, this is a racecar. Even the wheels are covered in an aerodynamic fin and the height of the car is quite low. I've had to squat down to be at the same height as a driver.

Of course I couldn't let the day go by without taking the opportunity to sit inside an actual racecar. After this photo was taken they put the aerodynamic lid on (you can see it in the first photo). It wasn't exactly spacious in there, but that's part of racing I guess.

On the day they were talking about their new car for this year's World Solar Challenge.

It will be in the "Cruiser" category, meaning it's a 2-person car and looks less like a racecar and more like something you might drive on the streets.

They hope to have them available for sale to the public soon after the race.

Today I saw the episode 5 True Colours - following two US state governors.

It was stunning what a difference party politics makes to their ability to serve their people.

One moves his state forward on renewable energy and the jobs of the future. The other, despite his state being terribly hit by Hurricane Sandy, ignores climate change science. The science says this area will be increasingly hit by extreme weather events as climate change worsens. But because of his party's stance he continues to pour billions of dollars into rebuilding in the same disaster-prone area.
PS. The cover photo for the series is from this episode. That's actually the damage to someone's house after Hurricane Sandy.